It's Been a While!
Posted: 5 September 2022
This week we feature Red Deer for the first time in a while. I think the last time was in January 2020
In spite of the headline, you are not seeing a Red Deer at the beginning of this sequence. Rather you are seeing is a 15 second clip of what took place on Monday, 29 August, some 12 hours before the Red Deer appeared. A male Muntjac makes his way around to the side of the bridge where he ascends onto its deck. The clip is here to show the difference in size between Muntjac and Red.
At 06:40 on Tuesday morning you see the head, neck and back of a Red appear. He seems fixed on something going on on the Ruston House side of the dyke and after 15 seconds he moves out of frame. He is followed immediately by three further deer.
Next we switch to a daylight shot captured some three hours later at 09:30. It's an almost identical pose to the one seen in the earlier encounter and lasts just 10 seconds. But this one is different because rather than leaving the frame on the left the animal appears to turn round and pass under the branch from which the camera hangs. Perhaps the rest of the herd remained behind the camera as the next segment suggests, as you might expect, that they remained together.
It's still Tuesday as we switch to the third segment of the video. Now it is 18:15 and an adult Red appears in shot. It approaches the bridge then some 10 seconds later a juvenile arrives in shot. The adult then leaves and after a while the juvenile follows.
A few more seconds pass before another adults arrives from the same direction as the first and this one appears to follow the others. This makes me wonder if the fourth deer that was with the group twelve hours earlier might have taken a slight shortcut and passed in the same direction but behind the camera.
The segment concludes with another shot of a Munjac. This one captured an hour and a half later, at 19:45. Again it is simply included to demonstrate the size difference between the two breeds.
Postscript!
Posted: 10 September 2022
Red Deer are certainly in the area, while driving home at about 20:45 last night Diana and I saw a herd of around a dozen close to the road on the field opposite Bristow's Farm.
